As of: February 17, 2024, 1:48 p.m
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Hans-Georg Maaßen (CDU), former head of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
© Martin Schutt/dpa
The Union of Values around the former President of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Hans-Georg Maaßen, has founded a party that is to the right of the Union in terms of content.
Several participants in the founding meeting confirmed to the German Press Agency on Saturday that the party had been founded.
For this purpose, Maaßen and his supporters had gathered on a ship on the Rhine near Remagen.
Berlin/Remagen - According to previous information, a statute and a program are also to be decided.
The 61-year-old Maaßen says he wants to run for party leadership.
The conservative, long-time CDU-affiliated association Values Union set the course for the founding of the party in January at a general meeting in Erfurt by transferring the naming rights.
The Maaßen Party is the second prominent new formation in 2024. At the beginning of the year, the Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) alliance of the former left-wing politician had already formed as a party.
According to representatives of the Union of Values, the new party will run in the state elections in September in Brandenburg, Saxony and Thuringia, but not in the European elections in June.
In an interview broadcast on Friday evening, Maaßen told broadcaster tv.berlin that the Union of Values wanted to fill the gap between the classic CDU/CSU, which had abandoned the path, and the AfD, which had become radical.
“We stand for classic bourgeois values that have made Germany strong and that ultimately shaped the CDU.” The union of values is for freedom, the rule of law, democracy, tolerance, but also for the withdrawal of the state from people’s lives.
Maaßen, against whom the CDU executive board initiated expulsion proceedings in 2023, resigned from the CDU in January.
He recently made it public that his former employer, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, had stored data about him in the area of right-wing extremism.
dpa